Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His latest book is The Fix: How addiction is taking over your world. He also writes about classical music for The Spectator.

The creepiest image published this week shows Chinese teenagers hooked up to IV drips in a classroom, feeding amino acids into their bloodstreams so they can concentrate harder on their National College Entrance Exam. The school, in Xiaogong, central China, is unapologetic. Parents ask for the drips, it says, because otherwise their children become exhausted swotting for examinations that will determine the course of their lives.

It’s easy to jump to conclusions. Those ruthless Asians! So this is where the “tiger mom” thing leads – to a jab of the needle to make sure the homework gets done and your son or daughter ends up working for a bank rather than assembling iPhones and thinking about topping themselves.

But hang on. In America between 2003 and 2007, the number of parent-reported cases of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) increased by nearly a quarter. That’s a million extra children taking medicines far, far stronger than amino acids.

Let’s leave aside the sensitive question of whether ADHD is real. Instead, we should ask: how many of the millions of Ritalin and Adderall pills handed out for ADHD are taken by students who weren’t prescribed them, but who have traded them from friends or siblings?

Attention-deficit pills are popular with young people for two reasons. First, since most of them are amphetamine-based, they can give you a nice buzz. Second, you can be cognitively “normal” and still find your concentration magically boosted. Which is handy, if you’re just about to sit SATs or college exams.

Last summer I sat in the canteen of one of America’s most expensive universities. I was interviewing a professor for The Fix, my book on addiction, about the use of doping as a study-enhancing tool. He said there was a lot of it about. But I could have worked that out for myself, because in the background we could hear college kids discussing how much Adderall they’d need to finish their term papers.

The plot thickens. In addition to the ADHD drugs, there’s a new generation of “smart” enhancers designed to boost perfectly healthy attention spans. These drugs, of which modafinil is the best known, help you concentrate and do without sleep – but don’t give you a high. Armed forces all over the world, including Britain’s, make use of them. They’re also all the rage at Harvard and Yale, where grade-point averages really matter. Now they’re spreading to England’s top-tier universities, where competition for highly paid jobs is most ferocious. They are showing up in the City, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, too.

Cognitive medications don’t make people cleverer: they keep them alert for longer. They may also cause psychological harm, but that’s unlikely to trouble an authoritarian country that decides to force-feed its citizens pills that will give them an edge over international rivals and could increase GDP.

The obvious analogy is with sport. It requires heavy, expensive vigilance to stop athletes taking illegal supplements. What will happen when the virus of cognitive doping works its way through the global economy? In a 24-hour working environment, there are few attributes more useful than not needing to sleep.

Some scientists think the legacy of these drugs will be burnout, brain damage and addiction. The truth is that it’s too early to say: we don’t have the data. By the time we do, hundreds of millions of people may have taken cognitive enhancers. That is an incredible prospect, potentially a turning point in history. Are we genuinely unaware of what’s happening? Or are we just having difficulty concentrating?

Carry no torch for modern Greeks

The hilariously cheesy lighting of the Olympic torch – more Blake’s 7 than ancient Athens – reinforced my scepticism that modern Greeks are descended from the builders of the Parthenon. So I did some digging, and came up with the verdict of Prof Anthony Smith of the LSE, arguably Britain’s foremost expert on nationalism. Greek demographic continuity was “brutally interrupted” by medieval Avar, Slav and Albanian immigrants, he writes; they pushed out the original inhabitants to the east and to the Aegean islands. Therefore modern Greeks are almost certainly not of ancient Greek descent. Is that a sigh of relief I hear from Mount Olympus?

The shower at BBC Scotland

The Prince of Wales’s oddly endearing outing as a weather forecaster brought out the pedant in me. Why was he introduced by the newscaster as “Your Highness”? He’s been His Royal Highness for 63 years – long enough for BBC Scotland to get it right, I would have thought. It’s almost as infuriating as the media’s habit of incorporating the Christian names of peers into their titles – for example, “Lord Peter Mandelson”. I am sure his Lordship would love to be the younger son of a duke or a marquess, but he is not. He is something far less dashing, a Labour life peer. I’ve given up hope that the Government will institute proper reform of the Lords, i.e. the full restoration of its sane and amiable hereditary peers. But can we at least learn how to address the present grubby crowd?

Who’ll be first to tie the knot?

President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage received fawning coverage from the American and British media. As our US blogger Tim Stanley noted, “The Prez could go seal-clubbing and much of the media would see it as a new epoch for winter sports. 'Barack Obama Becomes the First President to Kill Six Seals in Under One Minute,’ the New York Times would proudly report, while Twitter would be all abuzz with how hot he looks in snow shoes.”

Obama’s volte-face was a response to arm-twisting from his Hollywood supporters, who were threatening to close their wallets. The day after his announcement, he was welcomed into the home of a beaming George Clooney.

Hollywood has good reason to feel strongly about this subject. Several big stars have been in gay relationships for years. Now POTUS has made his historic gesture, they are free to ditch their “beards” (fake girlfriends) and marry their boyfriends. Who’ll be first, I wonder?

When hair didn’t move for a month

Vidal Sassoon’s great achievement, recalled John Frieda this week, was to end the era when “you had your hair done and it didn’t move for a week”. In metropolitan circles, maybe. But proper perms lingered in the Midlands, as Crossroads fans will recall. “Dear Nolly [Noele Gordon] would have been livid if her hair had moved within a month,” says one of her co-stars. “I remember a time when she slammed a door and the entire set collapsed on top of her. Fortunately the door bounced right off her perm, which budged not one inch. I told Nolly that if she took up motorcycle racing she’d be safe without a helmet. She smiled, but my character suffered a fatal stroke in the next episode…”